Pelosi-Gate

Once again, I find myself in stunned awe of the national media’s ability – certainly with the help of the always-clever Republican Party – to so deftly toss, turn and flip an issue as though it were a pancake in a frying pan, until it’s completely clouded over by a storm of controversy, until our brains are so scrambled that we have completely lost sight of what truly matters.

Headline news: Nancy Pelosi. Inquiring minds want to know: What did she know about the CIA’s use of certain interrogation methods (a nice way of saying “beating the living you-know-what out of someone”), and when exactly did she know it?

Of course, these are important questions to ask and are worthy of further discussion and investigation. But this latest firestorm seems to be happening at the expense of the real issue here, the one issue that truly warrants – and desperately calls for – an extensive, soul-searching and truth-baring national conversation: the illegal, unsanctioned, immoral, and utterly abhorrent use of torture at the hands of official representatives of the good ol’ US of A.

Have the Democrats forgotten this? Has the media? Has our entire country? As usual, the lazy and poorly organized Democratic Party is missing a golden opportunity to turn the tables and shove this issue right back into the faces of their rivals (no, I am not condoning partisanship… ) – easy to do, no genius required. The torturous acts in question were conducted under the Bush administration; this we all know. And Nancy Pelosi was not alone when this supposedly “misleading” CIA briefing took place – Republicans and other Dems were present as well (though I can’t seem to pinpoint the names of exactly who was there). If the Dems were at all savvy, and for once would step up and go on the offensive, they could swiftly counter Pelosi-Gate with a reminder of what we are really talking about here. Instead, they collectively roll over and play dead in a painfully weak game of he-said-she-said.

The issue here is not Nancy Pelosi. The issue is, how on earth could the US engage in such criminal and despicable acts of torture… and get away with it? Where and how have we as a nation gone so very wrong? And what are we going to do about it?

Inquiring minds want to know.